Elizabeth Anne Callan, 57, an award-winning producer for The NewsHour With Jim Lehrer for more than 20 years died Friday, August 17, at the Washington Hospital Center from injuries suffered in a fire.
Prior to joining The NewsHour in 1987, Callan produced and wrote for NBC News in New York for 11 years. As a producer for The NewsHour, Callan won awards for reports on Alzheimer’s disease, childhood cancer, and the toll taken on U.S. troops wounded in Iraq.
In the late 1980s, Callan produced NewsHour reports from El Salvador, Honduras, Chile and Nicaragua. At the height of the Contra war against the Sandinista government, she and her colleagues interviewed a contra commander and spent the better part of a day with a guerrilla unit inside Nicaragua. In 1989, Callan reported from Chile on the referendum on General Pinochet’s government. She and her colleagues correctly predicted that Pinochet would lose.
Callan is survived by her daughter Gabriella, her brothers Ned and John, and her golden lab, Louise.
